1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to games and more particularly to tabletop tile games for entertainment and educational purposes.
2. Description of the Background
Tabletop games include a wide variety of types of games including board games, card games, dice games, tile-based games and other games that are normally played on a table or flat surface. Such games have been played in numerous forms and variations from antiquity and are have been used as a way to teach concepts and strategy to adults and children alike. Board games such as chess, checkers or, more recently, Monopoly® are, as their name suggests, typically played on a marked board or mat that governs some aspect of game play. Other games such as tile games including dominoes and Mahjong require only an unmarked flat. Most tabletop games with the exception of many card games incorporate one or more game pieces which are physical representations that may be manipulated by the player(s) to achieve the goals of the game. Chess pieces, checkers, dice, dominoes and tokens are examples of game pieces used in well known tabletop games.
Domino tiles are flat, rectangular game pieces historically carved from ivory or dark hardwood such as ebony, with contrasting black or white dots referred to as pips. Modern sets may be made from virtually any material and are commonly made of plastic or resin. In their most common form, the tiles, sometimes referred to as bones, are modular rectangles (i.e., composed of two squares joined on a single side) with a number of pips appearing on each half of the tile. The traditional set of dominoes contains one unique piece for each possible combination of the two halves with zero to six spots. This set is referred to as a double-six set because the highest-value piece has six pips on each half (i.e, the “double six”). The pips from one to six are generally arranged as they would be on a six-sided or cubic die and domino tiles are thought to have been originally created or developed as a representation of all of the possible combinations of two such dice. There are 21 possible outcomes of the role of two cubic die. However, because dominoes have grown to include a “zero” tile, there are seven possible faces and thus 28 unique domino tiles in a double-six set.
There are many variations of tile game play generally and even many variations in the games that are played with domino tiles and referred to by the name “dominoes”. While these games may teach simple lesions (such as counting for children) and more complex strategy, depending on the rules of the game, traditional dominoes and other tabletop games are characterized by competition between players to “win” the game. Winning may be accomplished by collecting or scoring the most points, by playing pieces to accumulate the least points or by accomplishing a specified goal according to the rules of the game being played. Because of this competition between players, one lesion that is not taught by dominos is that cooperation among players can increase the collective good of the whole. It would be desirable to provide a game that is entertaining, easy to play in virtually any setting, requires few pieces to play and teaches participants to strategize for the good of the whole over the individual winner.